by Pete Hautman
But they had survived. Andy had lived another twenty-two years. Now, watching Tommy Fabian’s painful gait, he counted back and realized with some sadness that on that day in 1940 old Andy had been only sixty-two years old, younger by eleven years than Axel was today.
Axel caught up with Tommy. “You ever feel old?” he asked.
Tommy shook his head. “Just a little sore sometimes.”
“You ever think about taking a partner on? Somebody to help you when you get old? I mean, older?”
Tommy said, “No way.”
“I’ve been thinking about my future,” Axel said. “I get sick or something, I don’t want to have to close up shop, you know?”
Tommy Fabian wasn’t listening. They had reached the mall, and he was staring at Tiny Tot #1. The lines were good, and most of the machines were cooking. Tommy watched the stand as though he could not quite believe it could run without him. His employees, most of whom had cooked their first donut only a week before, were cranking the little rings out like they owned the place. Sam sat atop Tommy’s stool, an unlit cigarette in his mouth.
Tommy turned to Axel, shaking his head in wonder. “Just stay with it and don’t get old. The best thing you can do about it is don’t get old.”
Axel said, “I don’t know, Tom. I can’t say I much like the other choice.”
Kirsten sat on the folding chair behind the stand, smoking a cigarette, blowing smoke out through her nose like Madonna. She was halfway through her second pack ever of Virginia Slims. It was her first break practically all day, and now it was starting to rain again. And wouldn’t you know, Sophie shows up with her evil eye and says, “Can’t you find anything to do?” She never showed up when Carmen was taking a nap behind the stand, no way. Kirsten wanted to stomp her feet and say, “You can have your stupid job, you smelly old … witch!”
Instead, she dropped her Virginia Slim and followed Sophie into the stand.
Carmen, moving as if the air were syrup, was making a Bueno Burrito for a rosy-cheeked, alert young man wearing a mesh Wayne Feeds cap.
Sophie glared. “For Christ’s sake, Carmen. What did you do, take a slow pill today?”
Carmen said, “Hi, Sophie.” She folded the burrito, giving it a final delicate pat, and presented it to her customer. “Thank you,” she said, turning away, ignoring the five- dollar bill in his hand.
“Don’t you want my money?” he asked Carmen, who seemed not to hear him.
Sophie stepped forward, snatched the bill out of his hand, and gave him his change. She grabbed Carmen by the arm and spun her around. “What is wrong with you?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Why do you ask?”
For a second, Kirsten thought Sophie might rip the sunglasses off and claw Carmen’s eyes out. A group of kids approached the stand. Sophie took Carmen by her shoulders and shook her, Carmen’s head flopped back and forth. The group of kids stopped and watched for a moment, then left. Seeing this, Sophie let go and told Carmen to go sit behind the stand.
Carmen said, as though nothing had happened, “We need change.”
Sophie checked the cash box. They were out of ones and quarters.
“Well, then, go tell Axel. He’s over at Tiny Tot, talking with Tommy.”
Carmen nodded, hung her purse over her shoulder, and drifted across the mall toward Tiny Tot Donuts.
Axel and Tommy, sitting on a pair of canvas chairs behind Tiny Tot, watched the light rain darken the street. People were moving into the buildings, some of them holding plastic bags over their heads.
Axel said, “You were a little hard on Sam there, Tom. I mean, he deserved it and all, but it’s not like he was one of your employees.”
“Son-of-a-bitch smoking in my stand.”
“He was just trying to help you out while you were laid up.”
“I ain’t laid up anymore. Changing my mix, f’Chrissakes.”
“Sometimes you got to let people help you the way they know how.”
Tommy shrugged and lit a fresh cigar, his hand shaking.
“You feeling okay?” Axel asked.
“I feel great. How the fuck are you feeling?”
Axel took the question seriously. “I’m feeling alone,” he said. “That’s why I decided about Sophie, you know?”
“I still think you’re nuts,” Tommy said. “The broad’s rippin’ you off every day, and you want her for a partner? That’s nuts.”
“I told you, she’s not ripping me off. She was just trying to make herself look good.”
“You believe that, you oughta be down on the midway, trying to win yourself some plush.”
“I’m tired of doing it all myself.”
“What the hell? It looks to me like you got a bunch a broads in there doing it for you.”
“You know what I mean. You ought to, anyways—I mean, look at you. You got a head all covered up with bandages, and every time you stand up you get dizzy—”
“That was earlier. I feel fine now.”
“Whatever. The point is, if you had a partner you wouldn’t even have to be here.”
“A few hours ago you were telling me I didn’t have to be here anyway.”
“You wouldn’t even want to be here. Besides, we’re talking about me, and I’m tired of running the show all by myself. Sophie works her ass off. Sometimes I think she cares more about that stand than I do.”
“She’s so great, how come you don’t marry her?”
“Too old.”
“Seventy-three’s not so old.”
“I mean her.”
Tommy, who had been drawing on his cigar, broke into a coughing fit He leaned forward in his chair, and Axel thumped him on the back. When he got his breath back, he said, “Chrissakes, Ax, she’s young enough to be your daughter.”
“She’s almost fifty,” Axel said.
Tommy’s eyes were still watering. “Pretty goddamn selective for an old cocker, you ask me.”
“I’m gonna take her over to this lawyer tomorrow,” Axel said. “Get it all set up. Why wait?”
“Christ, Ax, why don’t you wait till the fair’s over, at least. Give yourself a chance to think on it.”
“I think on it, I might not do it, and I want to do it, Tom. If I wait till the fair’s over, I’ll forget what it’s like to be alone in this business.”
Tommy said, “You’re always alone in this business. Well, look what we got here—speak of the devil’s daughter. How you doing, Carmen?”
“Hi, Tommy,” said Carmen. “I’m doing okay.”
“How’s the eye?” Tommy asked her. “I hear you got a heck of a shiner under those shades.”
Carmen shrugged and turned toward Axel. “Sophie says for me to go get some change,” she said.
Axel dug in his pocket and pulled out a set of keys. He handed them to Carmen. “You know where the truck is? Along the far row, way over on the other side of the lot About ten cars in from the back The change is in the back; you have to use the round key.”
“Thanks.” Carmen floated off.
“You’re lucky he didn’t use a baseball bat,” Tommy called after her. Carmen gave no sign she had heard. “She looks sort of out of it,” he said to Axel. “If she worked for the railroad they’d have her pissin’ in a cup.”
“She’s just sleepy,” Axel said.
“Yeah, right. Prob’ly been up all night banging Bald Monkey.”
“He’s gone, I told you. He’s been gone almost three days.”
“You mean you ain’t seen him in three days. Guys like that don’t go away until you make ’em. It’s like trying to get rid of a hungry dog. They just lie in the weeds and wait.” He looked up and pointed at the thirty-story-tall, blue-and- white Space Tower, with its rotating elevator. “He’s probably sitting up there looking down at us right now.”
Chapter 25
Carmen arrived at the truck, it seemed to her, only moments after she left Axel and Tommy at the Tiny Tot stand. Her hair was wet. She didn’t remember the walk at
all. She let herself into the cab and, resting her hands on the wheel, let her mind wander, hoping to remember what she was doing there. It started raining harder, she watched through the windshield as the world went out of focus. Dean had been gone going on three days now. She might never see him again. She knew she should be glad he was gone. It was no fun getting punched in the eye; it was hard to see in the rain, looking through mirrored sunglasses. Now, though, she found herself bored into a near-catatonic state. The days and nights of her future appeared endless and gray and smelled of frying tortillas. She almost wished some guy would come along and blacken her other eye.
After a time, more than a minute but less than half an hour, she remembered why she was there. She was supposed to get change. Sophie was out of change.
The back of the truck was as precisely organized as Axel’s room at the Motel 6. Cartons of cups and napkins and plastic forks were laid out along the left wall; condiments, chips, and other nonperishables were arranged on the opposite side. Carmen stood at the back of the truck, looking in through the open tailgate, feeling the rain on her bare arms. Where would he keep the change? She was supposed to know this. The bed of the truck was covered with a green packing pad. Carmen climbed inside. At the far end, against the cab, the packing pad stepped up and over a boxlike shape. Carmen pulled the pad back and discovered an oblong wooden box with an open top. The box contained a row of coffee cans. She felt excitement struggling to penetrate the Valium haze as she pried the top off one of the coffee cans.
It was filled with packets of sugar.
The second can was full of salt packets. She opened the rest of the cans. Taco sauce. Horseradish. Horseradish? More sugar. Equal. She replaced the covers and drew the pad back up over the box, wondering in a mild Valium sort of way why Axel was saving coffee cans full of condiments. Where was the change? She had done this before, last year, and she was supposed to remember. Axel kept the change in a special place, but where? She took inventory of the items surrounding her. Cups, napkins, paper servers, forks, canned chilies, chips, taco sauce . .. Wait. Back up. Cups. She opened the top of the carton and reached inside. There it was, the canvas bank bag. She opened it, emptied the contents out onto the packing pad, took five rolls of quarters, a roll of dimes, and three fifty-dollar bundles of one-dollar bills, and stuffed it all in her purse. That left three rolls of pennies, a roll of dimes, two fifty-dollar bundles, and two rolls of fives, tens, and twenties, held together with thick blue rubber bands. Carmen took a twenty from each roll, folded the two into a small square, and slid it into her back pocket.
Wandering back toward the Taco Shop, she wondered what Axel had done with his coffee can money. One thing she was pretty sure about—it had to be somewhere. Cheap as Axel was, there was no way he could have spent it. It occurred to her that he might have put it in a bank, which was what any normal person would have done a long time ago. But Axel hated banks. He said you couldn’t trust them. He even hated going into a bank to buy change, always counting it twice, right there in front of the teller. It was embarrassing. Carmen experienced a moment of disorientation. She stopped and let her brain spin free for a moment, enjoying the floating sensation.
Her mind returned to the physical task at hand. Her hair was heavy with water. The rain was lighter now, but steady, and the parking lot had become a maze of puddles, the larger of which Carmen walked around. She paid no attention to the smaller puddles; there were just too goddamn many of them.
James Dean sat in the torn and stained beanbag chair and watched Tigger tattooing Sweety’s forehead.
“Sweety’s even got muscles on his forehead,” Tigger said, pausing to wipe away the blood and excess ink. Sweety turned toward Dean and contorted his brow, which writhed impressively. The words FUCK ME were carefully outlined in black. Sweety himself had conceived the message. Dean had helped draw the letters with a felt-tip pen, and Tigger was working now on filling them in, using a pushpin to open the skin and a red Sanford marker for color.
“You know, it’s not going to last,” Dean said. “You want it to last you should use ashes from Styrofoam. That’s how we did it in Lincoln.”
Tigger said, “Yeah, well, we ain’t in Lincoln, and we don’t have any Styrofoam.”
“When’s the guy going to be here?” Dean asked.
“He’ll be here. Pork always does what he says he’s gonna.”
“That’s what you said yesterday.”
“Yesterday he was in Wisconsin. He didn’t get my message.”
“Fuckin’ Pork,” Sweety said, gritting his teeth as Tigger performed a series of pricks on the letter C.
“Hold still,” Tigger said. “You want this to look good, don’t you?”
He worked in silence for a few minutes.
Dean was bored. He figured he’d give Pork another hour, then take his money and leave. The more time he spent with Tigger and Sweety, the less he was inclined to trust then- choice of drug dealers.
For the past two nights he’d had a room at the Golden Steer out on 1-94, watching MTV, counting and recounting his money, and waiting for Tigger to arrange an introduction with “Pork,” the supposed connection, the guy with the meth. His idea was to parlay most of the six thousand seven hundred dollars into a half kilo of crystal methedrine—an incredible price, if it was any good—then double his money by selling it to a guy he’d met in Lincoln named Stinger, who, if all went as planned, had got out of prison on schedule, had returned to Sioux Falls, had got back into the drug business, and had as much cash as he’d claimed to have. And even if Stinger didn’t work out—a distinct possibility—there were always people looking to get high.
He hadn’t minded waiting at first. The Golden Steer wasn’t a bad place, but late last night he’d heard a crash outside his room and looked out to see that some drunk in a Cadillac had crushed his Maverick, driven right up onto the trunk. The guy was staggering around, muttering to himself, every few seconds giving the Cadillac a kick in the side.
Dean’s first reaction was to go out and beat the hell out of the guy, but then he started thinking about how the cops would be showing up pretty soon. At first, they’d be interested in the Cadillac guy, but sooner or later they’d be looking at those Nebraska license plates on the Maverick, and if they ran the plates, well, that couldn’t be good. He threw his stuff into his bag, walked down the hill to Concord Avenue, and called a cab. Since then, he’d been staying with Tigger and Sweety.
A scraping sound came from the window.
“There he is.” Tigger set the pushpin on the table. “That you, Pork?” he called.
A pair of black lace-up motorcycle boots entered through the basement window, followed by a blocky man with a stubble of dark hair covering his scalp and jaw. His eyes were black and alert.
“This here’s Pork,” Tigger said.
Pork was wearing a camouflage-pattern sweatshirt and a pair of baggy olive-drab pants with cargo pockets. Though he was about Dean’s height, he carried another forty pounds. His fingers were thick and short, and he held his arms a few inches out from his body, letting everybody know that he’d put in his hours on the bench. The guys Dean knew with bodies like that, they’d spent at least five calendars in Lincoln.
Pork grinned, his mouth forming a wide, pointed vee. “This place reeks,” he said. He looked at Sweety. “What did you do to your head, Sweety?”
“I’m giving him a tattoo,” Tigger said. “It was his idea.”
Pork took a closer look. “Hope you don’t land in jail with that on your head, my man.”
“They can fucking try,” Sweety growled.
Pork shrugged. “Believe me, they do.” He looked at Dean. “You the guy?”
Dean, half buried in the beanbag chair, gave a slight nod.
“How good you know this guy, Tig?”
“He’s cool,” Tigger said.
Pork put his hands in his back pockets, raised his eyebrows, and looked at the ceiling, still smiling, shaking his head like he couldn’
t believe it. Dean didn’t blame him. Tigger was not the kind of guy you would believe anything he said. But Pork looked like a guy you could do business with. A guy who’d paid some dues, learned how it’s done.
“Look,” Dean said, “you don’t know me; I don’t know you. That’s cool. You don’t want to talk, I can take my business someplace else.”
“Relax,” said Pork. He was looking at Dean, his alert eyes probing. Noticing the antithefl strip on Dean’s jacket sleeve, he said, “How come you don’t cut that thing off there?”
Dean looked at the plastic strip anchored to his jacket sleeve. “I kind of like it,” he said.
“So you walk down the street and everybody knows you’re a bad guy?”
Dean shrugged. “They can think what they want.”
Pork shook his head, but the stolen jacket seemed to make him more comfortable. What kind of cop would go around wearing something like that?
“What you looking for?”
Dean said, “What do you got?”
“Tigger said you were asking about some crank.”
Dean shrugged.
“I can get it.”
“Good.”
“How much you looking for?”
“I was thinking a half key, if the price is what Tigger said.”
“The price is good. I suppose you’ll want to sample the merch.”
“You got it with you?”
Pork laughed. “You got your money with you?”
Dean, who did in fact have the money stuffed in his jacket pockets, shook his head.
Pork said, “Let’s take this one step at a time, then. How about we get together tomorrow night for a little taste. You got someplace we can meet? I mean someplace besides this pisshole?”
Chapter 26
At ten-thirty Thursday morning, Frank Knox greeted Axel and Sophie at the front door of his aging two-story South Minneapolis Tudor. The house smelled like Lysol and something that Sophie could not identify. The attorney nodded to Axel, then smiled at Sophie and said, “You must be Sophia Roman.” He did not offer his hand but rather backed away from her, then he turned and led them through a cluttered hallway and up the wooden stairs, which were half covered with stuffed manila folders, notebooks, and loose stacks of paper. Knox moved through his possessions with a kind of sinuous grace, like a cat, keeping his hands close to his sides and touching nothing